Return To The Wild

My boyfriend brought home a snail. Actually, he brought home two. They languidly left trails of goo as they slithered along his palm, looking all cute and alien-like with their extending/retracting eyes.
He raided the cupboard (or was it the recycling bin?) and found a plastic dwelling for our quiet new guests. There was much research to discover what snails eat, where they like to live, what they like to do with their spare time and who their favourite celebs are...all in an effort to make them more comfortable in their new surroundings--our home.
Boy, it didn't take long for them to get comfy! In no time at all our two gooey pets layed a batch of eggs and Voila! a family was hatched! My boyfriend and I joked that the parent snails were our children and their offspring were our grandkids. When this little family grew to a whopping 83 members, I stopped laughing.
I don't know if you should admire a guy for tending to 83 snails or have him sent to a therapist, but take care of them he did, to the best of his abilities. There were some casualties through the months. Baby snails are micro-miniatures of their mature counterparts and have paper thin shells. One plastic lid can decimate a handful of these fragile infants with a Snap! Crackle! Pop!
There was laughter, there were tears, there were even attempts at escape, but after being confined to a life of store-bought soil and grocery store vegetation it is time that these small slithering slugs with shells return to their home in the wild.
My boyfriend and I are no longer a couple. I have tended to the snails for a couple of months now. Their numbers have decreased drastically but not during my care. I feel for these little critters but I believe, and had argued this point more than once, that they belong on the trail where they were found, not jarred and set upon a shelf like a knick knack.
And so I shall liberate my filmy family and wish them well on their journey through the wilderness of an empty wood lot in Port Perry. Vive les escargots!